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The New Stats Explained
by Ryan T. Campbell
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Johanna quoted in the Chicago Tribune about Fan Safety.
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This Month
Michael Street reviews
Mike Vaccaro's 1941: The Greatest Year in Sports
Saturday, March 14, 2009 1:00pm
Sportswriters-if not all writers-love to deal in superlative and exaggeration. The best hitter ever, the greatest team ever, the worst coach ever: we make Top 10 lists and fantasy drafts so that we can argue who's the best or most promising player today.
Mike Vaccaro plunges into the "best" pool in his new book, 1941: The Greatest Year In Sports and makes a convincing argument for this assertion. What makes this book a refreshing read, particularly for a sportswriter, is that he doesn't just talk about statistics and win percentages.
Vaccaro places 1941 firmly in its historical context, on the brink of World War II, to show us sports at its best. Sports are not just the thrill of competition among great athletes; they create the diversion and metaphor that enthrall us and keep us riveted day in and day out. We watch sports to escape from the far more momentous conflicts in the real world, to watch battles that don't end in bloodshed, and to cheer for our heroes, knowing that a loss still means they'll be back the next game.
And this was never truer than in 1941. As America grappled with colossal questions of whether and how to involve itself in the growing threat from Germany and Japan, the American people were treated to an athletic display unlike any it had ever seen.
On the baseball field, we watched Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio establish records that still stand today (and will likely stand much longer), while horseracing gave us the comeback exploits of Whirlaway and boxing fans saw Joe Louis nearly lose his first fight since the Schmeling debacle. It's unlikely we'll ever see the confluence of history and sports again-world war in our fragmented globe is unlikely, and sports itself doesn't hold as much sway as it did in the 1940s.
Though it's hard to imagine a time when sports had more of an effect on people, it's true. We may have sports networks to whip us into a frenzy these days, but we also have many other distractions. And our athletes are more distant from us, despite all that media coverage. They're multimillionaires, making movies and rap videos—even the lowest-paid player in any major sport makes more than most of us.
We don't identify with our athletes; we dream of being like them. Players are groomed for the media, branded and packaged to appear as flawless as possible. Gone are the days when the guy at the plate or in the end zone looked like the guy down the street, when he actually might be the guy down the street.
People followed sports in the forties not only because they were exciting, but also because the players themselves seemed more like us, living relatively ordinary lives, aside from the moments they stepped onto the field or into the ring and became objects of admiration. Pro athletes in the 1940s lived in apartments and hotels, not mansions in gated communities. You might not see Joe DiMaggio at the corner deli, but you might see Buster Mills or Bump Hadley (even their names seemed more accessible!).
World affairs were different in the 1940s, too. Today, we live under the shadow of terrorism, nuclear war, or tension in the Middle East, but most of us have been living with this our whole lives. Those of us older than thirty can recall two wars, neither of which involved more than a hundred thousand troops from a handful of nations. We're inured to crisis, our senses dulled by the constant pressures of the postmodern world.
People in the 1940s who were older than thirty could remember The Great War, a global conflict that slaughtered millions and involved every major power in a phenomenon called "all-out war." It was a loss of innocence that’s been well recorded in a war that incorporated new ways of killing and maiming soldiers-and it was supposed to be the last of its kind.
But not twenty years later, Germany was once again in the headlines. Hitler marched across Europe, "reclaiming" territory ceded in the Treaty of Versailles, before simply invading France and beginning to assault England. Japan invaded China, Italy invaded Greece and England fought Germany in Africa.
In those newly chaotic times, Americans needed a distraction, needed to watch a conflict that didn't involve someone's death, where which side you were on was a matter of neighborhoods and not world politics. Fortunately for them, a treasure trove of athletic achievement was at hand.
In the world of horse racing, Whirlaway was establishing himself as an undersized, come-from-behind sensation galloping towards the Triple Crown. Joe Louis, craving an opponent who could withstand his punishing power, found his worthy opponent in Billy Conn, a scrappy light heavyweight also looking for a new challenge. Conn would provide the Brown Bomber with his greatest fight since Max Schmeling, nearly defeating the heavyweight champ in spite of the size difference.
And in baseball, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams would set records that still stand today: DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak and Williams' .406 batting average. No one has hit .400 since, and it's possible (some say likely) that no one will ever match Joltin' Joe's mark.
The media would seize on these stories, and Americans gobbled them up, anxious for anything to take them away from the imminent threat of global domination by the Axis powers. Even as the draft snatched away stars like Hank Greenberg, even as the degenerative disease that would bear his name took Lou Gehrig, Americans wanted something to remind them of the resilience of the human spirit.
These four stories gave them that exuberant escape, that uplifting feeling that anything was possible, that underdogs could win and good vanquish evil, and that the world was comprehensible for the two minutes it took Whirlaway to gallop into both the record books and the hearts of millions.
If I sound grand and superlative, if my rhetoric seems too soaring for a sports book, it's all Mike Vaccaro's fault. 1941: The Greatest Year In Sports produces that kind of feeling, combining history with sport in a way that recreates the electric emotion of the times. It's hard not to feel like one of the millions listening to the radio broadcast of Louis and Conn in the Polo Grounds, cheering for Joe or Ted to get just one more hit, or screaming "Here comes Whirlaway!" along with the track announcer.
Vaccaro ably juggles all four of these amazing sports stories as well as the world's historic events, effortlessly dipping in and out of each tale so that the reader never loses track. Like the best artists, he makes a complex task look easy, his writing style smooth and engaging, his transitions as neat and slick as DiMaggio's stroke.
This isn't a book just for baseball fans, or even just for sports fans, because it demonstrates the importance of athletic competition. Sports are more than just entertainment or distraction, more than grown men being paid to play a children's game. Sports are an easy metaphor for the struggles of life, without the dire consequences or uncertain ends suffered by losses in war or finance.
It's why we watch them, why we follow them-they're the world writ small, presented in a neat package where the good guys and the bad guys are clearly delineated, where one side definitely wins and the other definitely loses, and the end is clearly visible. We retreat into sports because of the confusion and imprecision of everyday life. The fans of 1941 were rewarded for suffering through hugely disturbing world events with an exhibition of sports achievements that took their breaths-and minds-away.
Vaccaro's extremely readable book will almost make you wish for those calamitous days, so that we can all lose our collective selves in another series of headline-breaking athletic achievements. Almost.
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